Joachim

Joachim is the narrator whose childhood discoveries, family relationships, and later reflections make memory itself a central subject of the book. At seven, newly permitted to walk to school alone, he found a dead retiree in a garden. His attempts to tell the story turned into deliberate invention; one invented detail—the dead man’s wedding ring—then brought an actual, forgotten detail back to mind. That reversal becomes a model for Joachim’s understanding of how stories can alter, and sometimes recover, the past.

Identity and Childhood

Joachim grows up on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. Turning seven gives him permission to walk to school by himself, and the new independence changes how he experiences familiar surroundings: the hospital grounds and the streets, gardens, and hedges beyond them become a world he can explore at his own pace. He notices places as if encountering them face to face, rather than seeing them only while accompanied by his mother or brothers.

His childhood is also shaped by the hospital as a place of family life. At Christmas, one of the year’s great occasions for him is accompanying Hermann, the hospital director, through the wards. Each celebration must fit into a twenty-minute visit. Patients and staff gather before the gifts are revealed; after a pause, the patients rush at the parcels, tear them open, and, within minutes, leave many of the gifts broken. Joachim relishes this unruly scene. The hospital is not merely his father’s workplace: it is a setting where he witnesses intense emotion and becomes a familiar participant in its rituals.

The Dead Retiree and the Making of a Story

The dead retiree is Joachim’s first dead person, discovered long before illness, accidents, and old age take other loved ones from his family. The discovery unsettles and fascinates him. When his mother comforts him, Hermann responds in the language of his profession, placing the death in the context of life’s impermanence and suggesting that the man died of a heart attack while picking flowers. He reassures Joachim that the man probably did not suffer, but does not ask what Joachim was doing in the gardens, although he had forbidden him to go there.

Joachim’s older brothers initially do not believe him. Their disbelief culminates in one of his fits of rage: he weeps, swears that he really found a dead man, and demands to be believed. Their skepticism gives way to consolation and questions about the smallest details. Yet he remains resentful that no police officer contacts him, that he is not featured in a newspaper photograph, and that finding a dead person brings no reward. The episode is at once frightening and, in the child’s imagination, a chance to be recognized.

In the weeks that follow, Joachim retells the discovery to classmates, relatives, his brothers, and his parents’ friends. He learns to adapt the account to his listeners. For an audience seeking a scare, he emphasizes decay and the dead man’s staring eyes; when trying to impress adult men, he presents himself as methodical and decisive; for women, he allows himself more dramatic flourishes. He knows he is lying, but feels that the story has acquired a life of its own and that he must live up to it. The dead man’s imagined scene gathers embellishments because Joachim wants the extraordinary event to stay with him.

That process reaches its decisive turn when Joachim invents a gold ring on the corpse’s left hand. As he tells the detail, he suddenly sees the ring in his mind and recognizes that the dead man really wore one. Invention has retrieved a fact that conscious recollection had not supplied. The incident does not resolve the boundary between fact and fiction; it makes that boundary the problem Joachim will keep returning to. His lie acts like an instrument of excavation, bringing a real but inaccessible detail back into view.

Family, Work, and Everyday Encounters

Joachim’s relationship with Hermann combines closeness with distance. At the hospital, he sometimes visits his father on the way home from school. Hermann keeps him away from the waiting room and from patients, explaining that a patient might be someone Joachim knew, perhaps a child of one of his teachers. Joachim is curious, but the rule is firm: he must not go into the waiting room. The restriction gives practical force to his father’s professional boundary of keeping patients’ lives separate from his son’s.

When Hermann is working in his office, Joachim can sit quietly while his father finishes paperwork. His father asks how school went but expects only a brief answer and shows little interest in the details of Joachim’s school life. Joachim nevertheless likes being there. Once the paperwork is finished, Hermann accompanies him into the practice room; he wears a doctor’s coat while working at his desk, but meets patients in an ordinary shirt and sweater. The contrast between the forbidden clinical world and the permitted private visit gives their relationship a distinctive rhythm: limited attention, familiar access, and a boundary that Joachim continues to find intriguing.

A memory from Hermann’s fortieth birthday shows a more playful intimacy. While father and son look at opposite sides of a garden-furniture advertisement, Joachim leans in to inspect its picture of a woman painting a fence. Hermann slowly raises the sheet until their faces meet across it, replacing the pictured woman with his own face; they laugh, and he lowers the paper again. Joachim’s recollection preserves this small exchange amid the day’s larger events, illustrating how an apparently trivial image can become fixed in memory through the moment shared around it.

Joachim also absorbs practical details from family life in ways that do not always suit school. After watching Hermann treat sheep, he uses his knowledge of castration methods in an essay about the tides. The teacher’s question exposes the mismatch between what he knows and what the assignment requires. The episode links his early attention to concrete bodies and procedures with a child’s tendency to carry an absorbing subject into the wrong context.

Recognition, Loss, and the Work of Memory

Years later, Ferdinand mistakes Joachim for his dead brother. Ferdinand repeats that Joachim is alive and celebrates what he understands as his return from the dead. Only then does Joachim understand the confusion: both brothers had been absent from Ferdinand’s life, and the surviving brother has been mistaken for the one who died. Through Ferdinand’s error, Joachim is briefly restored to life as someone other than himself. The scene makes identity depend not only on the person present, but also on the grief and memory through which another person recognizes him.

Joachim’s later reflections extend the lesson of the ring into a larger view of autobiography. He doubts that the past is as settled and reliable as it seems, or that it simply waits to be recounted while the future alone remains open to shaping. He imagines that memories must be unpacked and worked through, and that the past may have to be accepted and shaped as chaos before the future can become genuinely uncertain. In this account, the dead can return through memory as familiar yet also independent of the versions Joachim has made of them.

His return to the psychiatric grounds gives that reflection a physical counterpart. The long enclosing wall and its gates have disappeared; several buildings have been demolished, another stands empty with smashed windows, and high opaque fencing now obscures much of the remaining site. Joachim finds the place nearly deserted, with an evacuated or closed appearance. The landscape of his childhood has not simply endured as he remembers it. Like the past he describes, it must be encountered again in a changed form.

Narrative Significance

Joachim’s defining movement is not from an untruthful child to a narrator who can offer a flawless record. Instead, the story of the retiree teaches him that invention and recollection can become entangled: his embellishment both distorts an account and unexpectedly recovers something true. Repeated retellings also show memory taking shape in company—under his family’s skepticism, his listeners’ appetite for horror, and Ferdinand’s grief-stricken misrecognition.

The book’s later reflections grow out of this early discovery. Joachim treats remembering not as the passive retrieval of a finished past, but as a process of reopening, arranging, and sometimes imaginatively reshaping what has been left behind. His narrative therefore makes the instability of memory part of its subject and its method: a story can change what a person believes, yet it can also give a lost detail—and, in Ferdinand’s eyes, a lost person—another life.